The purpose of this project is to evaluate a procedure for predicting whether retarded children will benefit more from speech training or sign language training. The literature currently shows that some children benefit from speech training while others do not; some benefit from sign training while others do not. There is no research addressing the question of how to decide which type of language training would be most appropriate and beneficial. A growing body of literature does, however, suggest attentional and processing deficits in profoundly retarded children. Some children seem to have difficulty discriminating and processing auditory information, while others are less discriminating with visual stimuli. The present project will assess whether these attentional/processing deficits may underlie child's failure to acquire language. Specifically, it is hypothesized that children better at visual discriminations will benefit moe from sign training than from speech, while children better at auditory discriminations will benefit more from speech training. A pretest is designed to identify 12 "auditory" and 12 "visual" children. Then each of the 24 children (8 per year), will participate for one year in both sign and speech training. The success of sign and speech training will be compared for each type of child (auditory, visual).